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PS4 Hard Drive: Tech Specs, Upgrade Advice, Performance and More

Playstation fans recently came to know about the official specification of Playstation 4 HDD via Germany Tech website "ComputerBild". For those who are unaware of or missed out on PS4 HDD Tech specs, the console comes with a standard HDD running 5400 rpm to keep costs, heat, and noise down.

Reddit user has posted a full details regarding PS4 Hard Drive: Its tech specs, Upgrade Advice, Performance and many more things. Take a look at it below.

Basic PS4 HDD Info

Make: HGST

Size: 500GB

RPM: 5400

Form Factor: 2.5 inch

Upgrade Options

Type: SATA based 2.5 inch laptop HDDs

Height: Between 9mm and 12.5mm

Prices: At the time of writing, the sweet spot is 1TB or 2TB drives. There is essentially no premium on larger drives right now (meaning two 1TB drives cost about the same as a single 2TB).

NOTE: 1.5TB is currently the maximum you can fit into a PS4.

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Performance

Higher RPM doesn't mean faster load times. Platter size (the disks that are inside the HDD) play an equally important role. Here's a quick rule of thumb to pick priority: size, RPM, cache (in that order).

To go a little deeper; if you have 4 platters in a HDD and the size of Drive A is 500GB and the size of Drive B is 2TB, then Drive B has a higher platter density (125GB vs 500GB). That means the HDD has to do less work to grab data because wherever the "head" reads the disk ("grabbing" data off the platter), it's going to "grab" more data per read from Drive B than from Drive A.

Hybrid drives (large HDD mixed with a small SSD) doesn't suffer from TRIM concerns, but may not be much of a performance boost unless you play the same game regularly. They get their speed by caching common files in the smaller SSD section, but they're usually not bigger than 8GB. For reference, Killzone:SF looks to be a 40GB install.

Warnings

PS4 does not appear to currently support TRIM. This means that if you install an SSD drive, it will likely die much earlier than intended.

TL;DR

The best bang for your buck HDD for performance, cooling, and size will be a 5400rpm 2TB 2.5inch HDD. If you've got extra cash, pop for a Hybrid drive but be aware these are untested right now. Avoid SSDs until the PS4 supports TRIM.